The album John Fogerty wants to delete from history: “A bunch of crap”
Whereas a painter might be expected to create one masterpiece in their lifetime, the unending high-pressure of the music industry demands its artists create one masterpiece every few years; a task so demanding that even a songwriter as accomplished as John Fogerty occasionally struggled to live up to it.
Gifted songwriters have always loomed large on the musical map, standing out as fantasy citadels among an otherwise fog-filled swamp of superfluous dross. Back in the 1960s, though, those citadels seemed to crop up at every corner; a disproportionate number of the world’s greatest songwriters emerged from the tumultuous landscape of the United States during that era, spanning the spectrum from Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix.
Yet, in spite of that oversaturation of songwriting excellence, the unforgettable tones of John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival still managed to stand out among the rest. Crafting a litany of generation-defining anthems, from ‘Proud Mary’ to the anti-war masterpiece ‘Fortunate Son’, Fogerty almost single-handedly introduced American audiences to the world of swamp rock, and he was rewarded with years of lengthy legal battles as a result.
As it turns out, Creedence Clearwater Revival wasn’t often a harmonious outfit to be a part of, plagued by in-fighting and a particularly restrictive recording contract with Fantasy Records which meant Fogerty didn’t own the rights to any of his own songs.
So, when CCR split in 1972 and Fogerty began to embark upon a solo career, that too was marred by legal battles and royalty disputes. Unsurprisingly, then, the songwriter had had enough, and promptly hung up his Rickenbacker seemingly for good. That might have been the end of one of America’s defining songwriters, were it not for the triumphant 1985 comeback album Centerfield, which expertly reaffirmed Fogerty on the mainstream stage.
If life were a Hollywood production, everything would have been smooth-sailing from there, and the screen would fade to black accompanied by the riff from ‘Fortunate Son’, but the reality of Fogerty’s solo career wasn’t quite so pretty. In the wake of that beloved comeback, the songwriter seemed to become somewhat overwhelmed by his return to the industry, culminating in the disastrous follow-up, Eye of the Zombie.
“What happened after Centerfield, that album basically opened the door and let out all that anguish that I had felt up until that time,” the songwriter revealed to Pitchfork in a 2007 interview. “That’s why Eye of the Zombie is not so good.”
Explaining the failure of that much-maligned 1986 album, Fogerty continued, “I can clearly see it was because once Centerfield came out and hit the top of the charts, it was like all those pains came out of you as if to say: you see? You see how bad it was? I could see the penitentiary that I’d been staying in.” Concluding, “A bunch of bad crap came out, and it’s on Eye of the Zombie.”
Not only did that record boast one of the ugliest album covers ever sent to the printers, but it also featured a plethora of Fogerty’s worst songwriting efforts, so it is no surprise that he all but disowned it in the many years since. It took over a decade for the former CCR frontman to create another album but, luckily, he hasn’t stopped since; proudly reclaiming his position among the United States’ all-time greatest songwriters.
